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High Quality Horn Loudspeaker Systems

The book "High Quality Horn LoudspeaHorn Book Jacket V3 front w releasedateker Systems" by Bjørn Kolbrek and Thomas Dunker has been released this autumn. This website will keep you up to date on the availibility, signing events and so on. We will also add supplementary material to the book, and tell our story about how the book came about, and the process of writing.

Currently the book is available from Lean Business Audio (should have stock soon) and Parts Express (stock will be sent). 


book front cover V5

As already known to some, the book "High Quality Horn Loudspeaker Systems" is being released this autumn. This website is set up on the occasion of this book being published. In the first place, it is intended to provide progress updates on the release and availability of the book. ...And what else? We are not quite sure yet, but we are already making room for some background information on our research and writing of the book. Later on, we think about adding supplemental and supportive resources related to the book and possibly other interesting updates on relevant research and developments. We can't exactly put the book away after it's been released, and we have to be around somehow as it reaches our readers.

 The book as well as this website is about sharing knowledge and information. The communities out there sharing our fascination and interest in this technology are who we want to share our work with. 

We, Dr. Bjørn Kolbrek and Thomas Dunker, both native Norwegians,  have worked together on research into horn speaker technology since 2004. We are now proud to announce the arrival of the first comprehensive book devoted entirely to horn loudspeakers, covering more than a century of developments in engineering, theory and industrial applications of the technology. The book came about as a result of the snowballing extent of our research, making it necessary for us to organize a vast amount of knowledge, information and data. Truly being one of a kind, it is also intended to be a "one-stop reference" work and an extensive guide to existing literature on the subject. We know from 25 years of actual experience how time consuming and challenging it is to locate and collect literature on horns and horn speakers, some of it dating back as much as a century and published in obscure journals. ...Or at least how much one can end up with if not content with less than "all of it"... Even though computers and digital devices made this research effort and book work possible, we have spent a lot of time handling printed, even typed or handwritten paper with information never digitized before we came along. We are especially proud of how we have documented horn speaker developments in the 1920-1940 period in unprecedented depth. 

 The theory part of the book could have been a book in its own right, covering essentially all theoretical developments to date, connecting it to modeling and computer simulation methods, bridging science having its origins in the distant past with the technology of the present. We hope it will also provide useful guidance for future developments, even with different points of departure across the variety of schools and styles of horn speaker technology. The theory includes distortion mechanisms as well as  perceptual and acoustical considerations, and further extends to a treatment of design principles for practical applications, covering transducers, horns and complete systems. This places horn speakers in the context of high quality sound reproduction, large portions of the theoretical treatments and considerations also having relevance to speaker systems in general. 

The scope of the book is broad enough that as a whole, it can not easily be described in simple terms. The book is also in itself a system of information with extensive bibliographies, footnotes and cross references. It is intended to be studied and accessed as a whole and is therefore published in a single (admittedly heavy) volume. The subject is complex and challenging and we feel that a printed book is the only appropriate format, more easily attracting undivided attention to its contents. (The table of contents for the book counts 17 pages as things ultimately turned out.)  We have been committed to write the kind of book about horn speakers that we ourselves have always wished would exist. As this task was completed after  more than a century of developments, the summary would have to be extensive and in its scope it would cover subjects of interest to different groups of readers. Some short articles saying more about the background of our research, the contents of the book, our objectives and the book presentation are provided in the "About" section on the top menu.

At the moment the 1000 first copies of the book are being printed in the UK. The book is scheduled for release on Amazon in mid-October 2019, this year also marking the centennial anniversary of the publishing of A.G. Webster's horn theory "Acoustic Impedance and the Theory of Horns and of the Phonograph" that got the ball rolling making this technology a truly scientific subject a hundred years ago.

We will be present for a book signing at the 147th AES Pro Audio Convention in New York City, October 16.-18.

The book will sell for USD150, available only in hardcover, with a quality sewn binding and printed on silk finish paper, 1070 pages, richly illustrated. We think we can promise you a treasure trove of information and knowledge about horn speaker technology, based on resources in our archive and our long term research of the subject.

And oh, do watch out for our articles on this site containing additional background information on our research and on the book, under the "Extra Material" and "About" menu headings.